Before a Part 107 flight, the remote pilot in command must address the requirements in 14 CFR 107.49(a)–(f). These cover the operating environment, participant briefing, control links, available power, attached or carried objects, and—when flying over people under Subpart D—the applicable aircraft requirements.

Practice Part 107 regulations — free questions with FAA references

14 CFR 107.49: the six preflight provisions

1. Assess weather, airspace, restrictions, people, property, and ground hazards.
2. Brief participants on conditions, emergency and contingency procedures, responsibilities, and hazards.
3. Check that control links work properly.
4. For powered aircraft, confirm sufficient power for the planned operating time.
5. Secure attached or carried objects and check their effect on flight characteristics and controllability.
6. For operations over people under Subpart D, verify the applicable aircraft requirements.

The chart will not show you what you’ll hit

This is the most useful thing to internalize about environment assessment, and it’s counterintuitive if you’ve just learned to read a sectional.

Structures below roughly 200 feet AGL are generally not charted. Charting focuses on obstructions of about 200 feet and higher. The countless shorter towers, poles, guy wires, and transmission lines that actually threaten a drone at 100 feet appear nowhere on the sectional. The absence of a charted obstacle is not evidence that the site is clear.

The MEF (Maximum Elevation Figure) compounds the misreading. If a quadrangle shows an MEF of 3,200 feet MSL and local terrain averages 2,100 MSL, that figure tells you that somewhere in that box a feature approaches 3,200 — roughly 1,100 feet above average ground. It is a quadrangle-wide worst case. It is not permission to fly at 3,200, and not a guarantee that nothing exists below that altitude at your specific site. It narrows the question; it doesn’t answer it.

Which leaves one irreplaceable step: the on-site survey. Nothing else finds the wires. Charted linear features help in a second way — roads, railroads, rivers, and power lines anchor crew communication (“hold west of the rail line”), and transmission lines are simultaneously a reference and a hazard your survey has to map.

For the airspace half, the free official tools stack usefully: the current sectional for boundaries and charted hazards, the FAA UAS Facility Maps for LAANC grid ceilings, and an FAA-endorsed airspace app to consolidate both plus TFRs. For special use airspace, the chart shows the normal schedule — not today’s status. Activation comes from NOTAMs, Flight Service, the FAA’s SUA status site, or the controlling agency named in the chart margin.

A defensible sequence for any new site: identify the airspace class at your operating altitude, check TFRs and NOTAMs, determine whether 107.41 authorization is needed, then survey the physical and traffic hazards.

“Enough available power” is a calculation (107.49 and 107.15)

The regulation says enough power for the intended operational time. That sounds like glancing at a battery icon. It isn’t.

Manufacturer figures are best-case. Rated flight time, wind limit, and range are established under ideal conditions — light payload, calm air, moderate temperature. Wind, payload, temperature, and battery age all subtract.

Hot and high stacks two penalties. On a 95°F day at a 5,000-foot site, a multirotor rated for 30 minutes at sea level should be planned for substantially less. Thin air raises the power required to hover while heat drives battery and motor temperatures toward their limits. A conservative derate plus a test hover establishes the day’s real numbers.

Wind makes consumption asymmetric. In a steady 15-knot wind, upwind legs cost far more energy than downwind legs — and on a mapping mission the flight home may be entirely upwind. Sizing the reserve for the upwind case is the point. Averaging the legs is how aircraft land in the wrong field.

Weight and CG are yours. Ensuring the aircraft is loaded within weight and center-of-gravity limits rests with the remote PIC under 107.15 and 107.49 — not with the payload vendor, and not with an inspector.

The most reliable endurance number for a given configuration is your own documented flight tests with that payload in your conditions, refined over time. Logged tests convert brochure figures into planning data.

For weather, pair the products: the METAR tells you what’s happening now — verifying 107.51 compliance at launch — and the TAF tells you whether the window holds through the flight. Either alone answers half the go/no-go question. Get both from aviationweather.gov or Flight Service, not a consumer forecast that omits ceiling and visibility detail.

The 107.49 briefing most pilots don’t know is required

The participant briefing in 107.49(b) is a legal requirement with specified content. Before flight, the remote PIC must inform all persons directly participating in the operation about:

• operating conditions
• emergency procedures
• contingency procedures
• their roles and responsibilities
• potential hazards

Not the manufacturer’s warranty terms. Not the pilot’s logged flight hours. If you’re flying with a visual observer or a payload operator, this briefing is part of compliance, not a courtesy.

Two items belong in it. The lost-link procedure — its purpose is to define predictable aircraft behavior (climb to a set altitude and return to home, or hover) when the command link fails, so everyone knows what the aircraft will do rather than guessing. And the power abort criterion: if the battery drops far faster than planned in flight, the correct action is to land as soon as practicable at a safe location while reserve remains — not to continue and rely on a low-battery auto-land, and not to climb to reduce load.

Practice questions on this

Want to practice the whole regulations section this way? The free 90-question Regulations drill runs in your browser, and every answer names the section it comes from — so you can check any of the above against the regulation itself.

Read next: 14 CFR 107.41: The Two Airspace Authorization Traps That Catch Part 107 Pilots • 14 CFR 107.29: Do You Need a Waiver to Fly a Drone at Night?

Where 107.49 now sits: the FAA reweighted the exam on 29 September 2025, moving Operations from the largest content area to 25%. That is a reason to study this section as judgment rather than recitation, not a reason to skip it. The reweighting, the October 2026 chart change, and what remains unconfirmed — Part 107 test updates, checked weekly.

← Back to the Part 107 Study Hub for the free drill and more plain-English guides to the regulations.

---

Study aid only. Not flight instruction and not legal advice. Regulations change — always verify against current FAA publications and current charts before you fly. These are original questions written to the ACS standards from public FAA material, not FAA exam questions.

Preflight checklist checked against 14 CFR 107.49(a)–(f) on October 3, 2026.